In the home, in better restaurants and in fast-food establishments the ubiquitous tomato is usually served as slices within a salad, within a hamburger or sandwich, or as garnishments to a side order. Typically, in restaurants, tomatoes are sliced as needed, or several hours earlier, which can lead to tomato slices of undistinguished consistency and freshness or some waste of the fruit. In the home, the availability of packaged, presliced tomatoes may be just another convenience in meal preparation but in the restaurant business environment, and particularly fast-food restaurants, the availability of packaged, fresh tomato slices can significantly affect the quality of the served meal, the time and ease of meal preparation, the reproduceability of the meal's quality, the cost to prepare the meal and, ultimately, the customer's satisfaction with the establishment. But developing a package for holding presliced tomatoes that meets the end-user's requirements of economy, convenience and sustained fruit-freshness has proven to be an elusive challenge to artisans of the fruit packaging industry.
Tomatoes are fragile fruit. They bruise easily; the whole fruit is sensitive to dehydration and oxidation; the pulp of the fresh sliced tomato is especially sensitive to dehydration and oxidation; and the pulp of the fresh tomato slice exudes a serum-like liquid that is an excellent media for rapid, induced bacteriological spoilage. Simply put, they are hard to handle and they are hard to preserve. Slice them and these problems become greatly exacerbated by the substantially increased surface area that is open to decay. Trying to place an intact sliced tomato into a package under rapid, low cost mass production conditions without injuring the fruit becomes a daunting, complicated challenge. Fundamentally, a freshly sliced and packaged tomato must be as storable and as transportable and as re-ripe fresh at the time of use as whole tomatoes would have been at the same time in order to be acceptable to the end-user.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,165,947 describes a package for whole (not pre-sliced) tomatoes that maintains the tomato in a relatively fixed position regardless of the orientation of the package and further maintains the tomato in a relatively uniform humidity inside the package. Maintaining the tomato in a fixed position prevents bruising or rupture of the skin of the tomato.
Contrary to this evidence of the state of the prior art, the present invention packages sliced tomatoes. According to the package of this invention, the exudate, that is unavoidably formed from the tomato slices, is minimized by maintaining the sliced tomato in an assembled condition. The package of the present invention accomplishes two (2) purposes. First, it physically directs the exudate away from the fruit in such a way as to control any adverse impact on the freshness of the tomato slices. Second, it maintains the sliced fruit in an assembled condition whereby minimizing exudation, oxidation and spoilage of the fruit. In addition, the package of the present invention is adapted to contain means that cooperate with mechanical holders that load assembled, but sliced, tomatoes and place each of them into a cavity in the package.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a package to fixedly hold, transport or store one or more intact sliced tomatoes under controlled conditions of atmosphere and humidity including means to separately accumulate exudate from the sliced tomato and thereby maintain the sliced tomato in a red-ripe fresh condition.
Another object of the present invention is to include in the cavity of a package for sliced tomatoes means to cooperate with mechanical devices that are used to load sliced tomatoes into the package cavities.
A further object of the invention is to provide a package suitable to achieve the foregoing objectives but compatible with manufacturing economies.
A still further object of this invention is to minimize the complexity of the package that holds the pre-sliced, but assembled tomatoes and to make at least a substantial portion of that package in a single step.
Still another object of this invention is to provide such a package for holding pre-sliced tomatoes that had controlled oxygen transmission (OTR) characteristics such that the inside of the package does not become anaerobic during shipment and storage.
Other and additional objects of this invention will become apparent from a consideration of this entire specification and drawing and the claims appended thereto.
In the present invention the term intact sliced tomato refers to a complete tomato that has been sliced but where the slices have been assembled, or preferably have not even been separated, so that the assembled sliced tomato resembles the whole, unsliced fruit. This enables the interior or pulp of the slices to remain in full contact with immediately adjacent slices and thereby minimize spoilage and loss of flavor.